Budget cuts threaten the existence of inner city school music departments across the US every year, but when Vivian Gonzalez learned that South Miami K-8 School, the school that fostered her lifelong love of music, was in danger of going silent, she decided to return to her alma mater to help save the program that had a huge impact on her life.

“I was a middle school teacher for six years,” she says. “When I realized how vitally important elementary music education was for the middle school, high school and college music programs, so I ‘demoted’ myself, gave myself a large pay cut, and committed to being an elementary school music teacher.”

We’ve all dreamed about being a rock star just like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, or Taylor Swift. But in Krista Fanning’s music class at Caddo Middle Magnet School in Shreveport, Louisiana, her kids don’t dream of becoming rock stars… they tap into the rock star that already lives within them!

Every year, students come into her class a little bit scared, not knowing what to expect, but at the end of the year they leave as music makers who’ve learned to listen to and create music, primarily with the guitar.

Lights, Camera, Action! The curtain rises and onstage stands Sharkapella, an a cappella group made up of high school students who regularly return to Franklin L. Williams Middle School to work with their former middle school teacher, John Flora. They are poised and ready to blow the crowd away with their incredible voices. John smiles proudly from a distance as his current middle school students watch their old classmates with admiration.

A suggestion box sits on a table in the music room at Marie Curie Middle School in New York City. As music teacher Jennifer Schecter reaches in to read the daily suggestions, she finds a familiar request: a beginner guitar class. Unfortunately, Jennifer does not specialize in guitar and thus, does not know how to teach it.

Knowing that her students wanted to learn to play guitar, and that her main goal was to engage them in making music, she decided to do something about it. Jennifer took the initiative and attended one of Little Kids Rock’s training sessions, where she learned how to play the guitar, teach music as a second language, and to meet students where they are by teaching them the music they know and love.